Career Vision Board: Your Goals for the Year

Create your board for 2025 with smart tools and templates.

5 min readDec 27, 2024

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A vision board is a creative and strategic method that helps you to visually structure your goals. It finally turns dreams into plans and makes them easier to fulfill. If you would love to find job abroad, these simple tips for international applications will help you. You’ll be able to think about things intensively and look at them again and again. That way, you’ll never lose focus.

The process is also a lot of fun and can be repeated every few months if necessary. At the same time, it can also be a great transition to personal branding. Also, make sure to use the cereal box method to find out what makes you special!

The new year is here and what better way to finally make your dreams come true?

Why a vision board for your career?

Create clarity: A vision board forces you to think carefully about what you really want and how you envision it. You can create your board in detail or only in a rough outline. Do you want a management position or specific skills? Or finally start your own business? By the way, Chile is famous for its start-up scene.
Increase motivation: When you have your goals visually in front of you, your drive becomes stronger, especially on days when you might feel like you’re not making as much progress as planned. You always see what you’re doing it for. Do you dream of working in Hong Kong or New York for 1–2 years? Then be sure to check out the international VIE program!
Stay focused: In everyday life, it’s easy to get distracted or even limit yourself, especially in your own comfort zone. Your vision board constantly reminds you of the important things and that you are chasing a tangible plan. You don’t have to hold on to specific words, but can see everything in front of you. Speaking of words: These days, despite AI, you can often do without cover letters. There are much better, stress-free alternatives.
Positive energy: Working on your vision board is fun and gives you positive vibes, which is exactly what you need to get started. It helps you to prioritize and sort your thoughts in a nice and simple way! Because very often there are things in jobs and applications that are not necessary at first. Find out here which fields you can skip in the application form.

Which tools are suitable for your career vision board?

You can create your board either digitally or analog, in the traditional way with paper. The following tools, for example, are available to you free of charge:

Figma
Miro
Mural
Canva
Powerpoint, Keynote (yes, it really works!)

How to create your career vision board:

💭 Take time to dream (approx. 45–90 min.)

Before you get started, gather your thoughts. Think about where you see yourself within a year. What do you want to achieve? Which jobs, companies or projects interest you? Do NOT limit yourself here! Think as big as possible! How about applying to be an astronaut, for example?

You can either write it down in advance on post-its or a piece of paper or start directly with photos.

📷 Collect inspiring images and words

Browse through magazines, use Unsplash, Pinterest or Google to find images, quotes and words that match your goals. This can also be interesting for your CV, as long as you don’t fall for these 5 well-known CV myths.

Think about everything: the job title, the workplace, the city you want to live in and even the work-life balance you’re aiming for. If you love to work and study at the same time, a working student job in German might be perfect for you. Find out what it is and how to apply.

Pro tip: With the free Unsplash plug-in in Figma, you can search for images without leaving the application. So you don’t need to constantly jump back and forth between windows.

Search for images with a free Plug-in in Figma. — Work smarter with the plug-ins and templates in Figma.

✂️ Design your board

Caution: Don’t spend too long searching for the right image. You can change this later, so the search should not be the main point. Focus on the goal itself, as the pictures only serve as a reference. Your final goal will not look exactly the same anyway!

Stick your collected images and words on a poster or create a digital vision board. Arrange everything in a way that makes sense to you, but one thing doesn’t have to be related to another. There are no rules, only your own style counts!

👀 Display it

The aim is, of course, to have a visual compass. So keep it in a safe place, either as a (pinned) file, print it out or hang up your collage in a prominent spot. Ideally, it should be somewhere where you will see it every day. This could be on a mirror, for example, or digitally as a background.

Once you’re done, you can optimize your LinkedIn profile accordingly. These tips will magically attract recruiters!

🗓️ Use it as a reminder

Regularly take 1–2 minutes to look at your vision board and remind yourself of your goals.

Ask yourself: “What can I do today to get a little closer to this dream?”. You can set reminders or appointments in your calendar so that you don’t lose track.